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What’s Up With Ripple?

Ripple is regarded as one of the oldest and well-backed cryptocurrencies, having been around for six years now. The main aim of Ripple is to create a protocol for large financial institutions to use, in order to make the transactions quick and secure.

One of the striking features of Ripple is that it is not mineable, this means that a user cannot use the computer to create new Ripple coins. All the coins on the Ripple network are pre-mined and held by the Ripple team, only to be released as per the protocol. Since all the coins are pre-mined, there is no delay in the transaction and no need for the resource-intensive proof-of-work protocol. This allows it’s blockchain speeds to be unmatched when compared to the verification protocols of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum and many others.

A story of strong Partnerships

Since its inscription, Ripple has aimed at gaining the support of many centralized financial institutions. It has succeeded in doing so, accomplishing to gain the trust of reputed banks like SANTANDER, American Express, SBI, AXIS as well as 75+ other business partners.

Ripple promises extremely fast transfers in comparison to any other network currently available. Thus, this makes it a sweet asset to team up with, especially for the financial institutions. Ripple’s first launch was the xCurrent service. This allowed the banks to process international transfers within minutes.

This is remarkable as traditionally, it used to take many days for the banks to process these transactions. This lightning fast transaction system attracted even many businesses to the platform.

Launch of new Services

Ripple launched its next service, the xVia. With this businesses can plug into the Ripple network and send payments to another business in a fraction of the current time-frames and costs. This doesn’t only save businesses a lot of time but also helps their clients gain trust. With xVia, Ripple is able to provide their services to many major companies, expanding the use of their blockchain to the rest of the world.

Recently, Ripple launched a pilot test for their next service, the xRapid. With xRapid, it is now possible to make cross-border transfers seamlessly. Once this service runs on a full scale it will attract more customers to the Ripple network. This also will further help to propagate blockchain technology to the masses.

Why isn’t Ripple skyrocketing?

All that looks sounds great right? So why hasn’t Ripple taken off gains yet? This is a question that is on the minds of many speculators throughout the crypto community.

One of the issues with Ripple is that unlike most other digital coins, there’s no open source code for its network. This means that the code is not available for anyone to view or contribute to. Which is a big part of the culture and essence of cryptocurrency.

Another controversy surrounding Ripple is that it’s centralized and managed by a single company. This is completely contradictive to Bitcoin, which main aim was peer to peer transactions based upon decentralization. The Ripple organization can alter Ripple’s protocol and can even burn the tokens or put a substantial amount in cold storages, thereby drastically manipulating the price.

From its 1200% gain in December alone we can clearly see the insane potential for the rise of Ripple. However, this was also largely based on rumors of its release on Coinbase, which never happened. This and its owing of bad blood that it has created in the crypto community, the odds of this happening again are very little unless it gets some more major partnerships, especially now, after the launch of the xRapid.

Conclusion:

Ripple is an under-rated cryptocurrency with great potential in the future. The partnerships with big financial organizations only help the cause to take the blockchain technology further to the masses. The fact of the matter is that if we expect cryptocurrencies to be globally adopted the banks will need their own coin. The challenge Ripple faces is that some major financial institutions are opting to create their own blockchain, so the pressure it on for Ripple to finalize major partnerships fast before this becomes the standards. If they can do this, along with a few key improvements, Ripple can be a great cryptocurrency to challenge Bitcoin’s dominance.